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Gaspard de la nuit

Introduction

Although Ricardo Viñes had arrived in Paris in 1887 as a boy knowing no French, he soon learnt large portions of French literature by heart and it was he who introduced Ravel to Aloysius Bertrand’s book of poems Gaspard de la nuit, written between 1832 and 1836 and published in 1842. The poems appealed to Ravel’s love of fairytales and the supernatural, and to his taste for Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre stories. The spirit of Liszt also hovers over Ravel’s three pieces, in the brilliance of the writing and no less in its technical demands. The water nymph Ondine tries to lure the author down to be king in her underwater palace: beauty and danger are wonderfully combined in Ravel’s score, and to this end he asked that Ondine’s theme should not stand out but should be absorbed into the surrounding atmosphere. Likewise in ‘Le gibet’ the bell, ringing for the corpse of the hanged man glowing red in the setting sun, ‘does not dominate, it is, it tolls unwearyingly’. Sad to say, Viñes insisted on livening up the piece, and after the premiere on 9 January 1909 Ravel entrusted him with no more first performances. Scarbo, the malevolent dwarf, here one moment, gone the next, is the master of surprises: ‘How many times have I heard his laughter buzz in the shadows of my alcove, and his fingernails scratching on the silk curtains round my bed!’ Ravel admitted that he had wanted to write a piece more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey, but that ‘perhaps I let myself get carried away!’

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Details

Ondine continues the tradition of 'water pieces' traced, among others, by Liszt and Debussy. Its final section parallels quite closely the developments in the text that describes a Lorelei-like water-nymph who seduces mortals.

Le gibet has no direct antecedent in Ravel’s output, but its macabre and desolate atmosphere instantly makes one think of Edgar Allan Poe: 'It is the bell which tolls from the walls of a city beyond the horizon, and the corpse of a hanged man reddened by the setting sun.' A piano roll recording of this piece, supposedly by Ravel, was actually made by Robert Casadesus under Ravel’s supervision, and what stands out most in it is the insistence of the tolling bell.

Ravel’s musical description of the malevolent gnome Scarbo was also motivated by the wish 'to write something more difficult than Islamey', an oriental fantasy for piano by Balakirev that represents an important marker in the final stages of the development of the Romantic piano technique. Ravel indicated that Scarbo’s first theme, developed from the opening motive, was illustrative of the words 'quelle horreur'. In his review of the cycle’s premiere in 1909 by Ricardo Viñes, Louis Laloy remarked upon the smile beneath Viñes’ moustache in this movement—perhaps reflecting either the bemusement at the composer’s success of transmitting the dwarf’s malicious humour or the bemusement at the composer’s success in writing a maliciously difficult piece.